Gucci bags and turbans is the first note I write after arriving for a Kundalini yoga class at RA MA (full name: the RA MA Institute for Applied Yogic Science and Technology) in Venice, California. There are a few dozen people in the room: women—mostly white, but not entirely—in their thirties and forties who seem like perpetual seekers; white guys with big beards and turbans who have the fervor of recent converts; a pair of spry septuagenarians who have the well-preserved look of the wealthy and who, as a warm-up, touch their forehead to their knees.

Guru Jagat, the 37-year-old owner of the studio, author of the just-released Invincible Living(Harper Elixir), and Kundalini's yoga's first crossover star—Kate Hudson, Goldie Hawn, and Alicia Keys are all devotees who pop up on Guru Jagat's social media—makes her way to the front of the studio and takes her seat on a small stage. Behind her is a 60-inch gong that she is fond of telling people was originally built for Van Halen. She has an aggressively leonine appearance, with long, blond, wavy hair when she's not wearing a head wrap, and is big-boned—not as some kind of euphemism for fat, just more Earth Mama than ethereal fairy lady.

While we flip from cat pose into cow pose, over and over until I feel motion sick, Guru Jagat sermonizes about various topics, veering from the benefit of cold showers to her love of Drake, with nuggets like "your mind is like a Rubik's Cube—you're tinkering around in there;" "I'm into long-term meditation relationships…make out with your meditation, that's my advice;" "We're already dead; we're dust; it's over." We chant "ong namo guru dev namo" and breathe in and out through pursed lips. Each of these kriyas, or movements set to breath, is supposed to stimulate something: prosperity, or tuning into our own intelligence.

It's hard to follow sometimes, and harder to keep up, but she's smart and witty and magnetic. Regardless of whether what she's saying makes any kind of sense to me—it does in the moment, but then when I read over my notes, I have no idea what anyone is talking about—I want to believe it all. At the end of class, we lay on our backs while Guru Jagat plays the gong.

Kundalini (the word means "energy" in Sanskrit) has always been on the esoteric end of the yoga spectrum, and bears little resemblance to the pre-brunch class you might head to on Saturday mornings. There are no downward dogs, plank poses, or shoulder stands. It's a combination of movement, breath, meditation, music, and deep thoughts; the idea is that these modalities awaken latent energy (the kundalini) that sits at the base of the spine and helps it travel its way up your body. Aesthetically, it's about as far from Lululemon as you can get. Sheepskins are favored over mats; the teacher will have a Sanskrit name; and teachers and students both are dressed in white, flowing clothes, wearing turbans and head wraps. It's also a far cry from the idea of the monkish yogi who swears off pleasure and worldly possessions and any pleasure that is not of the mind. Abundance and wealth are encouraged in Kundalini; sex, too, is seen as part of a balanced life.

In most studios, pictures of Yogi Bhajan cover the walls, the Sikh former customs inspector who brought Kundalini to America from India in the late 1960s, pitching it as a substitute for psychedelic drugs. Now, 50 years later, Guru Jagat is trying to bring yoga's most far-out practice to the mainstream, accessible for the kinds of people who read Goop and have made Amanda Chantal Bacon's Moon Juice a thing. In the process, she's rebranding an extremely specific breathing and movement practice as a combination of technology and life coaching.

Maybe it's the geopolitical climate, but it feels like we're all looking for answers now more than ever. Kundalini tells its followers that if you practice certain kriyas, they can help anxiety, insomnia, digestion, even your orgasms. In a world where it seems like everyone wants a guru, Guru Jagat's ultimate sales pitch is herself. Prosperity, fashion, good sex: to her, Kundalini has it all.

Before she was Guru Jagat—she won't tell me, or anyone, her given name—she was born in Colorado and raised in the D.C. suburbs by a single mother who was a movement therapist. They were New Age (Guru Jagat's mother fed her tofu sandwiches and was into Transcendental Meditation) but working-class. Guru Jagat went to college in New York City and practiced yoga; she tried out a Kundalini yoga class in Manhattan post-9/11. "After twenty seconds of some weird arm-pumping posture, I had a physical experience of elevation and clarity that no other spiritual modality had even come close to touching," she writes in Invincible Living. This is the hard part of talking to converts about what draws them in: when they describe their most formative experiences in spiritual patois, there's an air of you-had-to-be-there. I asked Shabadpreet, a former ballet dancer turned Guru's Jagat's RA MA chief of staff about her first Kundalini class. Her experience had the same lightning-bolt quality. "Within the first three minutes of class I was like, this is totally it, sign me up," she said. (I've never had that kind of moment; I wonder if I just haven't found that thing yet, or if I lack the personality type to try something and then orient my life around it.)

Courtesy of HarperElixir

A few months after her first class, Guru Jagat went to New Mexico's Española Valley to study with Yogai Bhajan at the ashram he founded there in the early 70s, called Sikh Dharma. Yogi Bhajan taught Kundalini, but also became a successful businessman, founding 17 companies before his death in 2004 at the age of 75, including Akal Security, a security firm worth over a billion dollars, and the popular Yogi tea line. He also branded Kundalini as a kind of technology. "He adopted a lot of scientific language when talking about Kundalini, which was a common way of talking for the yoga advocates at the time—making it compatible with modern science," says Andrea Jain, the author of Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture. These days, three hundred people live there full-time, near a Sikh temple, a community hall, and a plaza, and there's an annual 9-day summer solstice gathering that's sort of like Kundalini Woodstock, with at least 1000 people making a pilgrimage to wake at 3:30 am for prayers and yoga and meditation, eat burgers made of tempeh and oats, and take classes on spiritual living.

Sikh Dharma is where Guru Jagat got her Sanskrit name directly from Yoga Bhajan, which means "Bringer of Light to the Universe." (If you, perhaps, would like a Sanskrit name, they're available for a requested $40 donation to Sikh Dharma.) "I wasn't happy about it because I was, like, 20. Everybody else got cute names, and I got this heavy-duty one," she says. "I would not have chosen Guru. But it was a call to action: you're a teacher, you're a leader." In 2003, Yogi Bhajan sent her to LA to teach, and in 2013, she opened RA MA.

A typical morning for Guru Jagat starts with a cold shower at 4 A.M. Meditation is next. "My intention is, how can I best be used in a positive way? And then it kind of comes to the surface," she says. "That's my job really—I'm a public speaker, and yoga is just a way to get people to take in information."

When she's not teaching, she doesn't wear all white and wears her hair down. (It's a Kundalini practice that they say gives a cranial adjustment to help your brain function better and focus your energy. "I just love the kind of Nefertiti-vibe," she says. "It's a fashion choice for me.") She collects vintage 80s Kenzo and Comme de Garçons gowns. "I rent a house, I have, like, a mom car and two dogs," she says. "I have a normal life." Kundalini teachers: they're just like us.

"People ask me all the time who my PR person is," says Desiree Pais, a Kundalini teacher in New York. "I just do my meditations and work. You just become magnetic. The other day I got 9 emails about private sessions in 3 hours. I've built my whole business around prosperity."

Pais, incidentally, never took to Kundalini until she found Guru Jagat. "I liked the practice, but it didn't connect with me. I went to Kundalini studios and thought the teachers were very spacey and not very grounded. It was too far out. People turn it into this airy hogwash." Then she took a workshop with Guru Jagat at a retreat and watched RA MA TV, where you can stream their classes, and "it was approachable and real and funny. With all the women I adored, like Guru Jagat and Amanda Chantal Bacon, the common denominator was Kundalini yoga. I thought, whatever they're doing, I want some of that."

The idea of prosperity has been most central to taking Kundalini from its niche status toward the mainstream. Guru Jagat wrote a chapter on it in Invincible Living, and RA MA holds several prosperity meditation classes a day. In the Kundalini universe, "prosperity" can mean wealth, success, or freedom. It's all tantalizing. There is, for example, a five-minute meditation called Pranic Energy Multiplier that involves sipping in air through pursed lips to take in more and more breath. It's meant to help you hold more air on a physical level and, on a spiritual level, more energy. In class, a teacher might talk about getting over scarcity and poverty mindsets—Kundalini talks a lot about manifestation of things, and money is certainly one of them. All of this gives Kundalini an element of The Secret: meditation to manifest what you want in your life. After class at RA MA, Guru Jagat points to someone in her community who got a publishing deal. "There are children being born, and we have a lot of love stories, too," she says.

There is a Kundalini answer for everything, and it's usually extremely specific. Want to get your hormones in order? Do "Breath of Fire" for seven minutes a day. Need to give your digestive system a break? Eat steamed turnips mashed with almond oil, turmeric, lemon, and pepper for a week. Or try the self-explanatory "Yogic Practice to Break the Media Spell and Activate Beauty" by standing naked in front of a full-length mirror, saying I am bountiful, blissful, and beautiful. Bountiful, blissful, and beautiful am I to your reflection for between one and eleven minutes per day.

So it makes sense that a prescriptive practice that came of age out of the late 1960s counterculture is also unafraid to tackle sex. There's a whole chapter on sex in Invincible Living called "Sex Is Science," which includes a 15-minute meditation that involves sitting in butterfly pose, eyes closed, bouncing the body up and down while thinking of sex ("Consciously get horny and breathe"). There's advice not to have sex until 3 hours after you've eaten or between the hours of 3 am and 6 am. "Yogi Bhajan spoke highly against celibacy in any way shape or form; he said it fucks you up," Guru Jagat. "And if you look at any kind of spiritual community that was trying to sell celibacy, in the back room, people were fucking each other. We're not into celibacy; we're not into not having money." Her longtime boyfriend, John Wineland, is also a guru of sorts, teaching workshops on masculinity and sexual intimacy around the world. They are leading a 5-day Spiritual Intimacy and Yogic Sexuality in Maui in September at the cost of $4495 per couple. (For him: "Learn how to work with command and darker energy to bring spice to your sex"; for her: "Learn how to use sacred feminine energy to drive him crazy.")

Kundalini yoga is filled with talk of warriors, women alongside men, of equality between the sexes, and of the majesty of the feminine. Sex, in Kundalini, is a godly act. At the same time, they also want their followers to be discerning about with whom they're sharing sexual energy: there is a lot of fairly confusing talk of imprinting one's aura on the other during sex and the necessity to clear one's karmas (there's a meditation for that). It all seems a long way of telling you to be thoughtful and deliberate. I think money holds a similar place in the practice. You can have it and we can help you get it, the Kundalini message is, but be careful what exactly you wish for.

How exactly someone goes from a well-respected teacher to a yoga celebrity who can pose for the cover of her book and lead sold-out retreats around the world is "a magical mix of charisma and ambition," says Carin Gorrell, the editor in chief of Yoga Journal. (Readers are so into Kundalini that the magazine is planning to add a Kundalini 101 class to their online video platform.) "If you don't have star power, you won't go far. Guru Jagat is on social media; she wants more studios. She's not shy about her ambition."

At the same time, the spiritual tourist is Guru Jagat's bête noire. "I don't think you have results by just going to a class and Instagramming a Palo Santo stick," she says. "It's not hurting anyone, but it's detrimental when you're getting a lot of shallowness from something that is deep." Yet half of RA MA is taken up by a boutique where you can buy sage sticks and Moon Juice golden mylks and diaphanous white tunics—the very stuff the spiritual materialist latches onto. She's aware of this irony: consciously creating the kind of mystique that wellness tourists flock to, while also realizing that she can't write them off as too casual. "The little Palo Santo wellness girls come to all my stuff," she says, and she's happy to accept their devotion and step up to her guru name. "Kids definitely can sense it if someone is on some trip. They can feel if someone was talking one game and then behind the scenes being a bitch." She is, she promises, the real thing.

Landing image courtesy of Lisandra Vazquez and HarperElixir, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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